The property borders the eastern boundary of Rainy River Resources’ multimillion-ounce gold deposit in northwestern Ontario. The Burns Block Property is accessible by numerous all-weather gravel highways and township roads leading to provincial highways 11 and 71.

Chairman/CEO Jim Pettit tells ResourceClips.com, “Most of what we drilled in the first half of the program was only assayed for gold. We weren’t really looking at the silver. But all of a sudden we started hitting some really big silver numbers. So we started reporting silver as well, and we noticed the silver grades seem to be getting higher—certainly higher than Rainy River’s grades, as we came east. It’s a different mineralizing event. It’s a very high-grade silver, it’s called electrum. You get the gold and silver sort of trapped together. In the meantime Rainy started reporting their silver numbers too. They originally weren’t; you’d never hear about silver. But with the price of silver, it’s another credit to tack on. We’re trying to increase the value any way we can. We’re putting out gold-equivalent values now, and with these grades it’s a pretty significant difference.

Rainy River’s quite interested in what we’re doing. We’ve had some conversations going back and forth—we’re not exactly strangers—Jim Pettit

“We have two rigs drilling now,” he adds. “We had three, but the labs can’t handle it. We had to shut down for three or four weeks. We had 61 holes, and we were waiting on assays. On a program like that you need the results back to guide you. So we caught up.

“The labs are in Thunder Bay, and the three of them are just swamped. Rainy’s switched to our lab. They have 10 drills, and they have three more coming. A lot of stuff in the far west side of Timmins goes to Thunder Bay. Even Red Lake: there’s one small lab in Red Lake, but a lot of that stuff is heading to Thunder Bay.

“We have another 37 holes or so still coming; they’re coming out in bits and pieces. We just came back in with two rigs. One’s working mainly on the Eastern Extension, and the other is working around that high-grade shoot zone that’s within 100 metres of the western border, trying to do a little more definition. Our western border is where Rainy’s pit is going to stop,” Pettit says.

“We’ve been pretty successful in defining a reasonable resource. It extends as you come across the property. So the first 100 metres we’ve done a pretty significant job there, and we now have holes out to about 500 metres across. Once we finish the definition drilling, we’ll be stepping out both drills to the east. We got a big, huge geophysical conductor toward the northeast corner.

“We’re working on a resource estimate,” he points out. “We’re going to turn out a 43-101 sooner rather than later, probably fourth quarter. Rainy River’s quite interested in what we’re doing. We’ve had some conversations going back and forth—we’re not exactly strangers.”